Dean Aragón
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Dean Aragón, CEO & Vice Chairman Shell Brands International
Having grown up in the Philippines, Dean Aragón’s career journey is applaudable and motivational. Dean is the current CEO & Vice Chairman of Shell Brands International AG. Leveraging the brilliant lessons that he has learned from a career that spans over 30 years, Mr. Aragón‘s hands-on approach through maximizing the power and potency of a brand through harnessing its ‘humanity' has made him a ‘brand alchemist’.
Before joining Shell, Dean held various executive global brand roles at Unilever. In his current position as CEO and Vice Chairman of Shell Brands International AG, he drives a program for mentoring and empowering diverse, high-performing teams and individuals.
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“In audio, you can easily, vividly describe an elephant dancing on the rooftop, adorned with silk ribbons and emitting a variety of colorful light bursts. All you're doing is leveraging the power of words and voice to feed the imagination.”
— DEAN ARAGÓN, CEO & VICE CHAIRMAN, SHELL BRANDS INTERNATIONAL
Uli Reese: I’d love to hear a little about your journey to where you are now.
Dean Aragon: My original dream was to become the chief economist of the Philippines, which is why I pursued studying economics. However, at university, during Career Week, the folks from Procter & Gamble and Unilever came in to explain what brand management was all about. Because I was also into the performing arts, I thought it was more consistent with what I wanted to do. It's almost like show business in the corporate world. I love the notion of crafting brands, developing new products, and coming up with new ways to engage a specific audience. I was seduced by the possibilities.
Uli: Shell was one of the first brands to go beyond the sound logo and understand sonic identity. Why was this?
Dean: We wanted to dive into it primarily because of one singular rationale – which is something I wanted to pursue since I took over the Shell brand in 2014 – and that is, how do we humanize the Shell brand? Humans respond to things that are human-like, and that's why brands embrace a sense of purpose. Nothing humanizes a brand more than having a sense of purpose. What else can inject a sense of humanity into a brand? The senses. It needs to have human sensorial dimensions; what can people see, hear, touch, smell. And people respond to stimuli via audio signatures or audio personalities; that's why I refer to it as a soundscape because it's the whole system of sounds, not just the music or mnemonic signatures at the end of an ad.
Uli: Can you talk a little about your approach to the sonic process at Shell.
Dean: Over the years, we've built a library of different versions of the Shell soundscape, all aligned with and contributing to the unifying brand identity, personality, and equity. These are different versions of the sonic soundscape that fit a particular topic, geography or culture. We didn't want to make it a cookie-cutter. We call it the ‘Sound of Shell,’ and it’s an entire ecosystem. It needs to be broad so that you can curate it because you can't tell me that what works in the Philippines will suddenly magically work in Brazil. We are as diverse as you can imagine, with over 700 permutations of the ‘Sound of Shell’, but they are also working in a brand-cohesive manner.
Uli: The customer journey has completely changed, so what is your advice to your colleagues in the industry who have equity in their logo but need to apply it to shorter and longer formats?
Dean: Firstly, I don't believe there are many barriers other than our own understanding of what it can and can’t be. Visual branding seems to be limitless, and sound is actually as rich as it is wide. It needs to support the entire customer experience. Therefore, if the journey is a mixture of physical and digital through many touchpoints, you can certainly design an audio experience that matches and enhances the visual experience. The only real limitation is the way we brief for it. It starts by profoundly understanding the power of sound. I’m a big believer in voice and radio advertising because this is the one medium that is expressive and imaginative without having to spend that much.In audio, you can easily, vividly describe an elephant dancing on the rooftop, adorned with silk ribbons and emitting a variety of colorful light bursts. All you're doing is leveraging the power of words and voice to feed the imagination.
Uli: But your sonic identity has more than a sonic logo, it has different pieces, multiple assets…
Dean: … because it’s an entire soundscape. It’s more than a soundtrack. It’s more than a sonic logo or mnemonic. It’s more than sound effects. It’s all of that and more, working in concert to add a rich dimension to the brand identity. It is as wide as it is as far-reaching, with as many possibilities as one can imagine. It leverages the power of sound to stir up thoughts and emotions, just as songs and music do.
Uli: If you look at the past, present, and future, what are the main challenges and the main opportunities that you see?
Dean: There's an argument, which is false, that if we embrace sonic branding (and its parameters/guidelines), it will limit creativity. It’s something like, ‘Why can’t we use the most popular sound right now or the most popular movie soundtrack?’ The reason it's false is that it rejects the possibility that you can be creative and compelling with your own sonic branding system. If it were just a sonic logo, I would agree, but we've already discussed why it needs to be a full and wide sonic soundscape. The second reason it's a false argument, is that often, whatever the popular piece of music or song is, it can never be fully attributed to you. It doesn't really fully reflect your brand DNA, personality, or purpose. But if you were to brief and design a full sonic branding system for your brand, it’s bespoke and can be built upon over time. For a true marketeer who wants to design something truly compelling and differentiated, you need your own sonic branding system, just like your own visual branding system.
Uli: How does a brand become future-proof?
Dean: Connect it with the socio-cultural dynamics within which you operate. If that moves, then you move with it. There is also the vast landscape of media. If it moves from one medium to another, there is a certain way of making the sound come alive. How does it thrive within a digital reality or an augmented reality interface? Have a system that allows it to pivot when relevant and necessary.
What should not pivot is what it represents - the brand DNA should stand the test of time.
Uli: When it comes to licensing music, how do you feel about riding someone else’s coattails, as this is something many do, but you haven’t?
Dean: I believe strongly in building something for your own brand for the very simple reason that your brand has a unique positioning (at least it should). But you can’t steadily build the brand if you're constantly playing a series of short games; it will struggle to add up and perhaps never endure. My bias, which so far is a proven model for us, is to develop a sound system that’s so inextricably linkable to your brand but at the same time can flex with the social-cultural preferences and direction that a particular marketplace is going. You need both.
Uli: CMO’s have to sell sonic to their CEOs. But it’s so untested, how did you do it?
Dean: I'm fortunate that the leadership trusts and empowers me to make such strategic decisions - and that's also why they hired me. There is a solid business case for it. Why would you not invest in something that can become such an effective differentiator of your brand? The ROI is attractive. In our case, we save a seven-digit amount each year by not having to commission new work or by not having to pay licenses for sound or music that will not really add to our brand equity.
Uli: But what are we going to do as an industry when there is such resistance?
Dean: Perhaps the ROI debate is not the issue. I think it’s more an opportunity to improve understanding of what sonic branding is all about (and also what it isn’t). The need for good visual branding is established. We simply need to build on that and extend it to another sense: audio.
Note: The interview took place in Baar, Zug, Switzerland on the 13th of August 2021.
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